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Princeton-educated ministers and teachers established schools across Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Albert Baldwin Dod (1805-1845) was a Princeton professor and a slaveholder at the time of the 1840 census.

Princeton Theological Seminary’s 19th century faculty and students encountered enslaved people as a familiar part of life. Though early leaders of the seminary owned slaves and largely failed to condemn the institution of slavery, some notable alumni—including the first African American man to graduate from a theological seminary in the United States—became prominent antislavery activists.

A truly national denomination from the 18th century to the Civil War, American Presbyterianism encompassed a wide range of viewpoints on slavery. Prominent leaders in the church were slaveholders, moderate antislavery advocates, and abolitionists.

Jonathan Dickinson, a prominent figure in the Great Awakening of the mid-18th century, served as Princeton’s first president.  Genny, an enslaved girl he purchased in 1733, may have worked beside him and his students in the college’s earliest years.